


suffer all the children

by unknownbananna



Series: when love takes you in [4]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Adoption, Angst with a Happy Ending, Brother Feels, EVERYONE GETS THERAPY!, Everyone Needs Therapy, Father-Son Relationships - Freeform, Found Families, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Parent Tony Stark, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Tony Stark Has A Heart, abuse recovery, unfair depictions of the foster care system
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-04 12:41:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18343901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknownbananna/pseuds/unknownbananna
Summary: Raising abused kids is hard. Tony should know, since he was one. But he'd long ago left that life in the past, buried under layers of new traumas and more vicious betrayals. Or so he believes—until he becomes a father and realizes that if he means to help Harley and Peter battle their demons, he has to face his own.(Or, five times Tony and Harley and Peter are all a little bit broken, and one time they're almost healed.)





	suffer all the children

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Svn_f1ower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Svn_f1ower/gifts).



Almost two weeks into staying with Tony, Peter breaks a glass.

It’s not entirely unexpected. When he’s not swinging around New York by a thread, Peter’s clumsy—a fact he’d spent the last several months regretting, usually accompanied by a newly split lip (or worse). No, there’s no denying that Peter’s a klutz. And it’s not that they expect  _ Tony _ to hit them if they mess up—they just expect to  _ get hit.  _ (And maybe Harley, who hasn’t really seen Tony since he was ten, hasn’t yet ruled out the possibility of Tony hitting them. You never know with people who are under a lot of pressure, he reasons. The Tony he met in Rose Hill was a good man, but some people smile in front of strangers and snap when they get home. As far as he’s concerned, jury’s still out.)

Still, there’s no denying that the past two weeks have been a dream Peter and Harley have walked through in hesitant wonder. They’ve been tiptoeing on eggshells, keeping quiet and using their most respectful  _ yes sir _ ’s and  _ no sir _ ’s even after Tony told them they could call him by his first name, and in return they get soft beds and books to read and dinner every night. Their bedroom door stays unlocked at night. Tony lets them into the lab with him and allows them to them work on whatever they want, and never seems to mind if they don’t produce anything. They don’t have chores or smaller children to take care of. They do have nice clothes that fit them—clothes Tony  _ asked for their help picking out _ , even if he wouldn’t let them see the price tags when they questioned. Though he’s awkward and nervous, Tony laughs and jokes with them and tries his best to put them at ease in his house that he says is supposed to be theirs, too. He calls it  _ home.  _

Harley and Peter don’t know what they call it. Unspoken between them are the nights they laid awake at the group home, eyes open long after putting the little boys to bed, facing each other on their adjacent beds and whispering about the future. What would happen when Harley turned eighteen and was kicked out on his own, what they would do if they were split up and sent away for being “troubled”, how they’d get away and run together if either of them was caught shoplifting food. Even, on the tenderest nights, what a family might be like. What it might be like to be adopted. And Peter had hoped with everything he’d had and Harley had guarded his heart against being hurt again, and still they’d both prepared for the inevitable because good things didn’t happen to boys like them. 

Now that Iron Man, their childhood hero, their personal savior in more ways and at more times than one—more importantly, now that Tony Stark—is their foster father, and life has the potential to be the most wonderful thing they hadn’t dared to dream… Now, they can’t stop themselves wondering when it will be taken away.

When it happens, things seem normal, or at least, what they’ve made normal so far. Tony’s cooking breakfast on the stove like he has every morning. Peter’s getting ready to set the table like he has every morning. Harley’s teasing Peter like he has every morning. That’s when Peter knocks his elbow on the counter, and the glass he’s carrying slips out from his fingers and smashes into jagged shards on the kitchen floor.

Peter freezes.

When Tony whips around to make sure nobody’s been hurt, the first thing he sees are Peter’s wide, horrified eyes staring down at the remains of the plate. The second thing he sees is Harley moving instinctively, stepping in front of Peter. The kitchen is silent except for the sound of bacon frying on the stove, and in the very back of his mind Tony idly hopes it doesn’t burn.

The third thing Tony sees is Peter’s gaze move up from the floor to rest on the buckle of Tony’s belt.

In an instant, the horrifying spell is broken. Peter looks up and sees Tony, sees the hurt and sorrow and empathy in his gaze, and squeaks. “I—I—” He looks back down at the mess on the floor, and color rises in his cheeks. “I’m sorry!” he cries before turning on his heel and running out the kitchen door and down the hall. A door slams behind him as he goes.

Harley’s eyes flick anxiously from the shattered glass on the ground to the kitchen door. For how guarded he is, he’s actually pretty easy to read, and Tony can guess at his thoughts. “I’ll take care of this,” Tony says. “He shouldn’t be by himself.”

Harley starts and turns his eyes to Tony. “You didn’t break it.” He gestures at the ground. “I should—”

“You should go be with your brother,” Tony interrupts. He shakes his head. “It’s not a big deal, Harley. It’s just a glass. I’ll pick up the worst of it and then I’ll vacuum and then it’ll be gone.” Tony wishes it was that easy. He knows accidents like this leave shards all over the place and that they’ll probably be finding them for weeks, but that’s not something to mention now.

Harley doesn’t leave. He stays standing, staring down at the shattered glass like he can see beyond it and contemplating something far away. 

“When I was little.” Harley pauses. Tony knows that Harley’s childhood is a trauma labyrinth and waits, heart twisting anxiously as Harley collects his thoughts. The boy picks up again slowly. “And I broke your suit. You weren’t angry.” 

Tony wracks his brain for a second to remember the incident Harley’s speaking about. Then he remembers: Rose Hill and dying and a little boy and a finger knocked off of his suit. So inconsequential in the face of things—the kind of inconsequential a grown up forgets immediately and a child remembers forever. Harley continues. “You could’ve gotten mad. I deserved it. But you didn’t.” 

It doesn’t take a genius to realize there’s a lot resting on this conversation. Tony feels like he’s walking blindfolded through a minefield. He hopes to all above that he doesn’t screw everything up.

“It was an accident,” he replies carefully. “Those happen. Especially when you’re a kid. Kids make mistakes.” Harley still seems wary, though, so Tony continues. “Harley, kiddo, this—it’s just a glass. We all drop stuff sometimes. I did _ so much worse _ in my days as an alcoholic. I’d never be angry at you or Peter for accidentally making a mess. Never. And I would never hurt you for it.”

Harley nods. But his eyes are fixed on the ground, and Tony’s pretty sure to him the words felt empty. He suddenly feels a rush of exhaustion, a tiredness that runs past his bones.  _ How much longer?  _ he wonders.  _ How much longer until the world stops hurting them? Until they can be happy? How much more will we have to take? _

Harley turns to leave but Tony stops him. “Wait.” He pretends for both their sakes that he doesn’t notice the way Harley stiffens at the word. Tony grabs two of the empty plates from the counter and turns to the stove. The eggs are a lost cause and he shoves them to the back to scrape off later, but the bacon is still good and so is the toast, and there’s strawberries in the fridge. He butters several pieces quickly and piles the two plates high with more bacon and toast and fruit than two people could ever eat (even if one of them has a metabolism to rival Captain America). Tony hands the plates to Harley, who looks a bit shellshocked.

“Take these with you. You can stay in your room as long as you want, but we can’t have you two going hungry in the meantime.”

Harley still looks vaguely stunned. Tony knows why—he knows being denied meals was one of the more common punishments at the group home, and he’s known that since the day he went to rescue Harley and Peter from that hell house. But knowing the boys were starved doesn’t make it any easier to see them expecting it from him. Harley accepts the plates cautiously.

“Thank you, sir,” he says dutifully, and Tony shakes his head the way he always does. He feels like a broken record.

“Tony, kid. Or Mr. Stark, if that’s easier. Please.” 

Harley looks at Tony for a long minute, and Tony gets the uncomfortable feeling that he’s being x-rayed. There’s a weight to Harley’s gaze, like he’s thinking and remembering and taking the measure of Tony as he is, and then weighing him against the rest of the world. It’s a look Tony’s pretty sure a sixteen year old shouldn’t know.

Slowly, Harley nods. “Thank you, Tony,” he corrects himself.

Tony’s heart leaps up into his throat. It might seem like a small victory, but to him it feels like they’ve just scaled a mountain. “No problem, Harley,” he manages. “Take care of Peter, yeah? Tell him he doesn’t have to come out until he wants.”

Harley nods back and mumbles another “thank you” before slipping out of the kitchen and toward the room he shares with Peter, leaving Tony alone to survey the wreckage on the floor.

The mess is a little overwhelming. As much as he hates the fact that Peter was scared enough to run, Tony gets it—if he’d made a mess like this as a kid, he would’ve run, too. But that’s the kind of trauma (i.e. his own) that Tony  _ doesn’t _ want to confront today, so he sweeps that aside in favor of focusing on the issue at hand.

The issue at hand being that for once in his life, he doesn’t know how to fix this. It’s not an engine he can take apart and put back together. Harley and Peter as he remembers them are children, full of vitality and wonder. Both of them were wounded—Harley by his father’s abandonment and Peter by his uncle’s death—but both of them were curious, eager, even rebellious when the time called for it. They were vivacious, enthusiastic. Unabashedly occupying their space in the world. Now they’re both quiet, obedient and quick to apologize and always a little bit frightened, and Tony doesn’t know how to fix them, how to give them themselves back. He doesn’t even know where to start. 

It’s more than that, though, because Tony doesn’t know how to be a father. He doesn’t know how to be a  _ dad. _ He never had one. He has no concept of what it is to be protected and loved unconditionally _.  _ He knows well how to be abused, how to let himself shatter against fists and belts and razor words, but he has no idea how to help another person piece themselves back together. 

He wonders if it’s because no one ever helped him do so for himself.

He wonders if he’s the wrong person. Harley and Peter deserve someone better, he knows that. They deserve someone who can love them without tripping over their unpacked emotional baggage, someone who can shower them with affection and comfort and everything worth more than money. They deserve a father—not a man who doesn’t know how to be one. And he hates that life has dealt them such a bad hand, because for as much as he is certain Harley and Peter deserve more he also knows that he’s all they have in the world. And he knows, too, that he can’t walk out because that’s what  _ his _ father would have done.

These boys have had their hearts broken enough.

The glass shards on the floor sparkle invitingly. The cup broke pretty thoroughly—there’s so many shattered pieces Tony isn’t sure where to start. He feels overwhelmed. He feels young. He feels old. He feels vulnerable.

Tony takes a deep breath, bends down on his knees, and starts where he is.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Sleep" by My Chemical Romance.
> 
> My marvel tumblr is @marvelwhump--drop by if you want to scream about my favorite found family! (My main is @unknownbananna if you're looking for a disaster.)


End file.
